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Trois poèmes de Louise de Vilmorin, FP91

Introduction

Louise de Vilmorin (1902–1969) was a member of the family whose celebrated firm still supplies the well-to-do French middle classes with flower and vegetable seeds. ‘Few people move me as much as Louise de Vilmorin’, wrote Poulenc in JdmM, ‘because she is beautiful, because she is lame, because she writes French of an innate purity, because her name evokes flowers and vegetables, because she loves her brothers like a lover and her lovers like a sister. Her beautiful face recalls the seventeenth century, as does the sound of her name.’ She was a friend of Marie-Blanche de Polignac, who was originally the recipient of the third poem in the set as a Christmas present in 1935. Poulenc read the poem and immediately encouraged Louise to write more. The composer was charming in his insistence, and the poet eventually complied; all three of the songs that were brought to birth as a result were dedicated to Marie-Blanche, who sang them exquisitely—although no recording survives.

Though less well known and far less performed than the cycle Fiançailles pour rire this is a masterful group of songs composed, significantly I think, after the composer’s reconversion to Catholicism (at the shrine of the Black Virgin at Rocamadour in the Dordogne in 1936). It is the first set of songs to be composed after the great Éluard song cycle Tel jour telle nuit, and is the first specifically female cycle—bearing in mind that Tel jour telle nuit concludes with as wonderful a hymn to a woman’s deeper qualities, in fact Éluard’s hymn to his wife Nusch, that has ever been penned by a French composer.

Recordings

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This song has much in common with the first song on this disc, Le présent. The breathless tempo and ever-restless semiquavers, an octave apart, denote a family similarity. But the musical lines of Le garçon de Liège are longer and infinitely more melodic. The song, a pun on the word ‘Liège/liège’ at its heart (both the Walloon town in Belgium, and the noun for ‘cork’), describes a whirlwind romance with a good-looking but not particularly profound young man, the kind of liaison to which both poet and composer could be partial. The excitement of the chase and the melancholy that goes with it (the closing bars of the song are extraordinary in this regard), the elegance of a self-aware promiscuity that entails the gracious renunciation of something that can only be loved as it flies by, and not possessed—these things are somehow captured in this music. Vilmorin was also capable of much longer attachments: she married a Hungarian count and at the end of her life was living with André Malraux. Shortly after the war she became the mistress of Duff Cooper when he was British ambassador to France. Cooper’s son, John Julius Norwich, remembers her living in the embassy at the time, and that she was wonderfully kind to him as a gawky teenager; she taught him any number of racy French songs with guitar accompaniment, Poulenc’s, of course, not among them.

This is a breathless, triplet-accompanied song of erotic self-exploration. This at least is how Poulenc delightedly interpreted the poem’s first draft and Vilmorin was embarrassed enough by the seemingly inadvertent revelations occasioned by her stream-of-consciousness writing to change the poem for publication in her collection Fiançailles pour rire (1939). The title there is Choisir n’est pas trahir; the word ‘doigt’ (finger) is replaced by ‘mot’ (word) and the phrase ‘Jusqu’au dernier soupir’ disappears altogether. Poulenc was adamant in retaining Louise’s original words. The music is an impressive moto perpetuo for a delightedly bemused singer accompanied by roving fingers, including some untypically probing writing for the left hand in single quavers, not chords. It is remarkably successful in capturing a mood of quiet and private exultation.

Officers of the White Guard,
guard me from certain thoughts at night,
guard me from love’s tussle and the pressure
of a hand upon my hip.

Guard me above all from him
who pulls me by the sleeve
towards the danger of full hands,
and elsewhere, of water that shines.

Spare me the tempestuous torment
of loving him one day more than today,
and the cold moisture of expectation
that will press on the windows and doors
my profile of a woman already dead.

Officers of the White Guard,
I do not want to weep for him
on earth, I would weep as rain
on his land, on his star of carved boxwood,
when later I float transparent,
above a hundred steps of weariness.

Officers of the pure consciences,
you who beautify faces,
confide in space, to the flight of the birds,
a message for the seekers of moderation,
and forge for us chains without rings.

This song, apart from the Charles d’Orléans prayer Priez pour paix, is uniquely religious among the Poulenc mélodies, a moment of metaphysical contemplation within the corpus of songs otherwise worldly and profane. He writes in JdmM of resisting any ‘false richness’ in the harmony. These ‘officiers’ are clearly meant to be angels, and Vilmorin the repentant sinner. This kind of avowal, a renunciation garlanded in sensuality, is completely in line with Poulenc’s recently reawakened Catholicism. His first response to these words suggests the humility and harmonic austerity of prayer. The throbbing semiquavers, repetitions on the same note, create an aureole of sound that propels the music forward. If the composer claimed that this kind of bare piano-writing was meant to evoke the guitar that Vilmorin used to accompany her singing at the home of friends, he cannot resist employing the fuller resources of the piano as the song progresses. As the ‘officers’ are addressed with quasi-liturgical repetition, the song gathers power and harmonic complexity and becomes fervently visionary; this reminds us of the life-changing experience Poulenc had recently undergone at Rocamadour. Such writing also prophesies the music of Dialogues des Carmélites composed some twenty years later. The song ends with a five-bar postlude as if the composer had envisaged a closing blessing or Amen.

Officers of the White Guard,
guard me from certain thoughts at night,
guard me from love’s tussle and the pressure
of a hand upon my hip.

Guard me above all from him
who pulls me by the sleeve
towards the danger of full hands,
and elsewhere, of water that shines.

Spare me the tempestuous torment
of loving him one day more than today,
and the cold moisture of expectation
that will press on the windows and doors
my profile of a woman already dead.

Officers of the White Guard,
I do not want to weep for him on earth,
I would weep as rain on his land,
on his star of carved boxwood,
when later I float transparent,
above a hundred steps of weariness.

Officers of the pure consciences,
you who beautify faces,
confide in space, to the flight of the birds,
a message for the seekers of moderation,
and forge for us chains without rings.